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O’Connor annoyed by derby officiating

Leinster coach Matt O’Connor has expressed his frustration with the officials in Saturday’s derby loss at home to Munster.

Leinster coach Matt O’Connor has expressed his frustration with the officials in Saturday’s derby loss at home to Munster.

The reigning PRO12 champions were blown away in the first half at the RDS and despite a second-half comeback they were comfortably beaten.

That was despite Munster picking up four yellow cards in the final 22 minutes, but O’Connor was annoyed that referee Ian Davies did not bring the cards out sooner.

“It’s a little bit late, isn’t it? We made three or four linebreaks that the ball gets killed illegally, he [Davies] doesn’t act on those and that changes the nature of it,” said O’Connor.

“It was all a little bit too late from the officials, I thought. If [Munster get away] with infringing like that it makes it really, really hard.

“Every time we had any ascendancy with the ball, they killed the ball. You need strong officials and I don’t think we had that tonight.”

It wasn’t just Munster’s efforts in the rucks that annoyed O’Connor, with the scrum another bone of contention for the Australian.

“I think it was a guessathon to be honest,” he added.

“There was no clarity, I didn’t think, from the officials in that aspect of the game. From that end, it was ‘do your best’. You very, very rarely see a scrum refereed tit-for-tat, which happened tonight.”